the_taliban_shuffle_-_kim_barker

nothing like the Taliban. But they had no choice; like most other
Afghans, they kept their heads down and followed the rules. Farouq’s
female relatives wore blue burqas that turned them into ghosts
whenever they left the house. Farouq grew out his beard, although he
occasionally got into trouble because his beard just wouldn’t grow to
the proper length to signify that he was a good Muslim—considered a
fistful of beard.
As the Taliban regime spread its reach, Farouq prepared for his
future. He became a doctor. He learned anatomy by digging up
skeletons in graveyards—the medical students had no other choice.
They practiced surgery on the Taliban, repairing wounds earned
ghting the militia leftovers now outside the capital, which had
coalesced into a group called the Northern Alliance, dominated by
ethnic Tajiks from the Panjshir Valley, just north of Kabul.
After living through all this plus the fall of the Taliban regime,
Farouq behaved much older than I did. He seemed forty, even though
he was only twenty-six. He took care of at least ten relatives, from
nieces and nephews to his parents and a disabled sister. Farouq hadn’t
planned to go into journalism, or to become a “xer,” a foreign
journalist’s paid best friend, the local who interpreted, guided, and set
up interviews. He wanted to be a surgeon. But he would have earned a
paltry $100 a month as a doctor. With us, he made $50 a day. All the
young English-speaking doctors and medical students had started
working with foreign journalists, who probably single-handedly
eliminated a generation of doctors in Afghanistan.
Luckily, Farouq, a barrel-chested former weightlifter with a mustache
and thick black hair, was a natural journalist. He was intrepid and
resourceful. He was eager, probably because he was single, and a single
young Afghan man had little in the way of entertainment. It’s not like
Farouq could date or go to a bar. Kabul had no bars or dates, except for
the edible kind. Farouq was also connected to the entire country—
related to half, able to convince the other half to talk.
I told Farouq about my own life—kind of. I said I wanted to be a
foreign correspondent—kind of. And at thirty-two, I wanted to get
married to my serious boyfriend—kind of. Or maybe I wanted to do
both. I was still working it out.
At one point, we wandered through the streets of Kabul—cold, gritty,